When Horror Is the Truth-teller

Illustration by Kaitlin Chan, courtesy of the artist and Restless Books

No one is likely to shame you for not having read Dracula, the way they do The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch, though perhaps they should and perhaps that is, ever so subtly, what I am up to now. I was once the sort of person who thought they knew Dracula, and might have spent my adult life without reading the novel until a close friend dropped some very suspect-sounding and yet enthralling literary gossip: Dracula was rumored, he said, to have been inspired by Bram Stoker’s visit to see Walt Whitman with Oscar Wilde. Stoker had seen them kiss. Who inspired Dracula of the two, I asked him. Wilde, he said.

I threw everything aside to read the novel at last and to look up the story to which my friend referred. He had it almost all wrong. Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde had not visited Whitman together, for example. But both men were greatly in love with Whitman’s writing, and both visited him at his home in Philadelphia within two years of each other in the early 1880s. Bram Stoker’s wife, Florence Balcombe, who could so easily have been the model for Mina Harker, had once been romantically linked to Oscar Wilde; Stoker and Wilde had been young writers together in Dublin, friends and then rivals for her attention. But what I suspect from the histories now available to us is that they were rivals for Whitman’s attention as well.

Wilde went first, visiting Whitman in. In Michèle Mendelssohn’s biography, , she notes of their meeting:

The first line of the note at the beginning, sometimes left out of the many editions of , asks us to play a game: “How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them.” The opening chapters are taken from Jonathan Harker’s journal and rendered in shorthand, followed by letters from Mina to Lucy, sections from Mina’s journal, a fragment from a newspaper, notes taken by the vampire hunter, and so on. Who, then, has ordered these papers? Dracula himself? Mina Harker? Who is the survivor who could or would gather it all? And perhaps it will entertain you to riddle this out for yourself, if you even remember to do so—the novel’s trance is intense and engrossing. A folio novel — which is what this is — is a sibling to the epistolary novel, posed as letters collected and found by the reader or an editor. In the case of , the result is one of the world’s most famous stereoscopic narratives, created out of several accounts of people dealing with Dracula, but never an account from Dracula himself. We do not see Dracula sign his name to any of these documents. The novel is a fragmented narrative, as well, but is almost never acknowledged or discussed as such. In 2008, while putting together a class on fiction writing at Amherst College, I decided to teach my students from , , and , edited by Stephen King. I was interested in asking this question: Is there an emerging aesthetic in American fiction that combines the literary aspirations of with the Gothic aesthetics of ? Because it seems as though there is. And Stephen King is either the progenitor of such a movement or its most visible face. I was also interested in at least two ways of reading these massive, classic novels. Both are approaches to writing about Evil. Both are also novels with main characters known to you even if you’ve never read the books themselves — novels whose characters have become fictional celebrities. Whether or not the novels are immortal, the characters are. During the tumultuous months of the Trump presidency, during the Covid-19 pandemic and the George Floyd uprising, the feeling that our fictional sense of evil was not sufficient to match the evil in our world repeated as I watched some of the popular entertainments meant to help me stay inside my home, safe from the virus and out of the overburdened hospitals. As Covid reshaped the world’s economies and democracies, and the spectacle of, first, the Trump administration having competence forced upon it and, second, the playing out of the Biden administration, I kept thinking, “The scale of this evil is set too low.”